WHO: Beth Chastain and Peter Johnson WHEN: The middle of the night, sometime earlier this week WHERE: Beth's dorm room SUMMARY: Beth and Peter have the same dream and it's weird, okay. WARNINGS: None! Still in progress -- will update when complete.
It wasn't often that Beth would wake with a start. Even on the rare occasions that she didn't wake up before her alarm reminded her that she had obligations, she usually just managed to turn it off before slowly coming to real consciousness. Tonight, though, she woke with a start, her eyes flying open. Unlike the last time it had happened, though, she wasn't flailing out of fear and feeling as though her skin was crawling with spiders, worrying that her step-mother would hear her and yell at her for making a fuss. Instead, it was just confusion as the dream slowly formed in her mind, solidifying in a way that dreams never seemed to.
As she tried to sort through what her mind was telling her, Beth carefully pulled herself into a sitting position and took in her surroundings. She was in her dorm, of course, but in the dream she had been in a different room -- the Big House, she recalled -- and then outside, leading the way through a camp. It was dark, her dorm lit only by the moon and stars that were peeking through her blinds and the salt lamp that was turned down in the corner that cast a pale orange glow. It had been the opposite in her dream, bright and sunny. It might have been around the same time of year, but it was the middle of the day. She had been younger and, details that were all thanks to the glimpses in passing windows, looked nothing like she actually did. She had been blonde and tan, but not in the same way her mixed racial background made her such now. She had been wearing a bright orange t-shirt, a color that didn't exist in Beth's wardrobe and was a far cry from the black tank top she was currently wearing.
What stuck out to her, though, was who had been with her. Beth looked down to Peter, taking up half of her bed, which was actually the two single beds that came in all dorms pushed together to make one large bed, thanks to her having no roommate as an RA. His being there at all went against the rules she enforced as an RA, but she wasn't too concerned about that right then. Peter had been in her dream, but he hadn't been Peter. Percy, they had called him, and she had nursed him to health after an attack, had told him he drooled when he slept, then eventually took him to his cabin.
None of it made sense. In fact, as the details became more clear and more akin to a memory than a cloudy dream that she felt slowly slipping through her fingers, it just confused her more. Beth knew she should just shrug it off and go back to bed, her early morning class coming in too few hours, but she couldn't shake the unsettling feeling that she was missing something.
Reaching out, Beth let her fingers graze over Peter's hair, then into it. She wasn't necessarily trying to wake him up, more just wanting to seek a feeling of normalcy in the contact.
Peter was always more slower to wake up. He was the kind of person who would sit up in bed upon waking and grumble and think to himself whether it was worth going to that class or not. And probably nod off to sleep for about two minutes while sitting there. But that didn’t mean a stroke of his hair by his girlfriend was not going to pull him out of what he was hoping was a dream. Peter blinked awake, staring at nothing in particular, at first, trying to make sense of what he had just dreamed of, the taste of the healing ambrosia that he swore was still in his mouth, looking at a curly-blond-haired girl and thinking he had died and gone to heaven.
She had looked nothing like the girl who was leaning over him and stroking his hair, the girl he was absolutely crazy about. Somehow, Peter just knew that regardless of how she looked, the blonde he had just dreamt about and the brunette in front of him were the same. “‘Sup?” he mumbled groggily, lifting his head up slightly. He frowned a bit, glancing around the room, taking in his surroundings. It wasn’t some sort of camp cabin, and that was obviously not where he was right before he fell asleep, but the transition from dreamworld to reality was a little hazy this time around. “I just had the weirdest dream.”
Beth felt a twinge of guilt as Peter's eyes opened -- less because she had actually woken him up, but more due to the wave of relief she felt at his being awake with her. The dream she'd had hadn't necessarily been a bad one, but the unease she was still feeling over it being more than just a dream wouldn't go away. Having him awake meant that she'd have a distraction, especially when he admitted to having had a strange dream, too.
"Yeah?" she asked. Beth eased back onto the bed, pulling her hand back as she laid on her side, her head propped up by one hand. "I had a weird one, too. I think it woke me up." She paused, then asked, "Do you want to talk about it?"
Peter wrinkled his brow slightly. Sure, he wanted to talk about it, but he wasn’t exactly sure how to explain that whatever it was felt like way more real than a dream was usually supposed to feel. That would sound crazy. Plus, he wasn’t sure if it would be a sound idea to tell his girlfriend that she was probably supposed to be a white blonde girl. “It was…” he trailed off, licking his lips for a moment, to piece together what he wanted to say. “It happened in a cabin. Like a medic cabin on a camp. Somewhere in Long Island. Some big… thing with horns had just attacked me.”
Beth felt one of her eyebrows raise as Peter spoke, the details eerily similar to that of her own dream that she'd just woken from. She hadn't been the one fighting the monster, but she had definitely known that the boy that she had been helping attend to had just fought one -- and he was the boy that had looked so similar to her boyfriend that she was looking at right then. It was strange. Had they watched something recently that would have them dreaming the same like that?
"Weird," she murmured, still looking confused. "Was it a minotaur?" The name of the creature came to the surface quickly, but she still had to ask.